Notice: this page describes the GTK-OSX port of GRAMPS to Mac, which has not been thoroughly tested. Everything should work just as it does on Linux, but you are encouraged to make backups to protect your data. Time Machine will do very nicely.

Notice: This page is in transition at the moment; a new set of binaries for 3.2.4 will be available shortly. The build instructions will be changed first, as they will enable you to build your own 3.2.4 bundle from sources. Most of issues below apply only to the 3.1.2 build and have been corrected for 3.2.4.

The GTK-OSX port of GRAMPS for Mac is a single, stand-alone bundle which uses the native quartz windowing system instead of X11.

Mac GRAMPS is available for both Intel and PPC Macs. OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is presently required; WebKitGtk doesn't presently work on earlier versions. The distribution page carries both a binary application that should work as soon as it is downloaded.

Start-up settings for GRAMPS (for e. g. the environment variable LANG) can be accessed through Gramps.app (generally in /Applications): Right click on "Gramps.app", select "Show Package Content" from the menu, the start-up settings are found in the file Contents/MacOS/Gramps.

Download: Select one of Intel or
PPC. You'll get a download window. Once it's downloaded (it may take a while, they're 38M each), you can open the dmg (just double click on it in Finder if your browser doesn't open it automatically) and drag the Gramps application wherever you like. Once installed on your computer, it opens like any other application.

Back up your databases: If you're using Time Machine, that's already taken care of. (You do test your Time Machine backups periodically, right?) But it doesn't hurt to have a spare copy set aside before starting up a new version. If you've been using the Gtk-OSX build, version 3.2.4 or later, just copy Library/Application Support/gramps/grampsdb. (Right click/option click and select "Make a copy" from the menu. It will be named grampsdb(2).

New Version Notice: The new (3.2.4 and later) builds will default to using your Library/Application Support/gramps folder, which, if you want to keep your old database and settings, you'll need to create. Unless you've changed the location in Preferences, they're in a hidden folder in your home directory called ".gramps". Select a Finder window and select Go>Go to Folder from the menu. Type "/Users/yourname/.gramps" in the dialog box that opens up, and click on "Go". (Yes, subsitute your userid for "yourname".) The hidden folder will appear, highlighted and open. Option-drag the whole thing to Library/Application Support (the one in your home folder, not the one in your boot drive's "root" directory). Slow-double-click on the new copy so that you can edit the name and delete the '.' at the beginning to unhide it.

Language: The GRAMPS application takes per default its working language from the System Preferences - International (Languages & Text in Snow Leopard) settings. It will search the list in order and select the first one for which there is a Gramps translation. It is, however, possible to decouple the language that you use for GRAMPS from your system language setting by modifying the GRAMPS start-up settings file. Find the "Gramps.app" file (generally in /Applications). Right click (CTRL-click) on the file and select ""Show Package Content" from the menu. Open Contents/MacOS/Gramps with a text editor (e. g. XCode for syntax highlighting). Add the following two lines after the default language selection routines at line 105:

unset LANG
export LANG=<locale>

For example, use "export LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8" for a French speaking GRAMPS running on an English MacOS. Save the file. Check which locales are installed on your Mac and how they are called by typing "locale -a" in the Terminal application.
For more information on language choices in GRAMPS see the following wiki page:
Run_GRAMPS_in_a_different_language

Links with other programs: Double clicking an image in the media reference editor should bring up Apple Preview, or a similar program, to view the image. Clicking the view button in an internet reference should bring up the URL in the default browser. Clicking the Google Maps button in the Places display should bring up the map in the browser.

GRAMPS doesn't use the X11 Mac package. It's useful to install LibreOffice (or NeoOffice, a more mac-friendly version) and Graphviz to produce reports, but they are both straightforward.

Dictionaries: The spelling checker uses MySpell dictionaries -- the same ones that LibreOffice and NeoOffice use. Unfortunately, they bury them in their application bundles, so you can find them to download here. You need to install them in /Library/Dictionaries, and you'll need to authenticate as an administrator to do so. If you have one of them installed and know how to make symbolic links from the command line, you'll find them in Contents/share/uno_packages/cache/uno_packages, scattered about in the hash-named directories. You'll need to link both the aff and dic files (e.g., en_US.aff and en_US.dic).

If something seems to go wrong

You'll find error messages in the console log, which you can view with /Applications/Utilities/Console.app

Bugs

All of the known bugs in 3.1.2 have been corrected in 3.2.4. There will no doubt be new ones; report them in the usual way on Mantis (instructions). When reporting what you're sure is an OSX specific bug, please set the Platform field to "mac" (no quotes, caps, or spaces!) so that I can find it easily.
The 3.1.2 bugs are described at Mac gtk-osx port bugs.

Updates

GRAMPS stores all its internal data in ~/Library/Application Support. So, to upgrade a Gramps application bundle to a newer version, just throw the old application in the Trash. Make a backup copy of your data, just in case, then download the new version of the application and just use it. If you don't like the new version and want the old one back, throw the new version in the Trash and fetch the old one back from the Trash. The Gramps version is shown in Finder if you use column view; otherwise right click on it and select Get Info.

Building GRAMPS from Scratch

Building Gramps from scratch is useful to produce a version not currently available as a binary (for example, a PPC version) or to produce a complete environment for debugging and further development, including debugging of all the C libraries Gramps uses, like gtk.

This is a command-line process. It's not too difficult, but you'll be using Terminal.app, not XCode. Unfortunately, Gtk has so far resisted efforts to get it to successfully cross-compile PPC on Intel or vice-versa, so the whole process must be repeated on machines of each architecture. WebKit will not build on 10.4 (Tiger) or earlier systems, nor will it build against a 10.4 SDK. You must be running 10.5 (Leopard) or newer for this procedure to succeed!

You'll need XCode, Apple's development environment. There's a copy on your OS X distribution DVD, or you can download the latest version from Apple, though you must register as a Mac developer.

It's important that jhbuild is not confused by any existing MacPorts or Fink installation. For this reason, it can be convenient to create a new Mac User account and log in to that account.

If you are building for distribution, especially if you are running Snow Leopard on a 64-bit capable machine (Core2Duo, Core i5 or i7, or any Xeon) you should edit the file ~/.jhbuildrc-custom so that the call to sdk_setup looks like

setup_sdk(target="10.5", sdk_version="10.5", architectures=["i386"])

(If you're building on a PPC, you don't need to worry about this.)

If you're not familiar with using the unix command line, you might find the frequent use of "~" below puzzling. It refers to the user's home directory (mine is /Users/john; if your name is John, then yours probably is too.) You can use it that way in commands if your current directory is somewhere else.

jhbuild is installed in ~/.local/Source, and produces a binary which appears in ~/.local/bin. You'll want to add ~/.local/bin to your path:

export PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH

Next, you'll need to get a local copy of the gramps mac configuration stuff from svn (if you already have a gramps svn sandbox, then skip this step and substitute the path to it where appropriate below):

jhbuild by default puts everything it is building in ~/gtk (controlled by the hidden files ~/.jhbuildrc and ~/.jhbuildrc-custom ). ~/gtk/source contains the downloaded sources, and ~/gtk/inst contains the built libraries and applications. More is built than is needed in the final Gramps application - for example, the build tools are themselves built.

At this point, you can do

jhbuild shell
gramps

at the command line and run gramps. Most everything will work (see the note about spelling dictionaries above).

Once you've done this once, you can generally get away with just running

to update everything that has been changed since the previous build. Most of the time nothing will have changed except gramps itself.

If you want to build the svn trunk, you can substitute "gramps-svn" for "gramps". If you want to have both installed, you'll need to set up separate prefixes in .jhbuildrc-custom; gramps doesn't version its installations, so the most recent will overwrite the previous build.

Bundling

The next step is to create an application bundle. You'll need ige-mac-bundler, so follow the instructions in the Gtk-OSX Wiki to download and install it.

You may need to edit ~/gramps-mac/Info.plist to update the version number and copyright information.

Now open a jhbuild shell and run the bundler:

jhbuild shell
ige-mac-bundler ~/gramps-mac/gramps.bundle

You'll have an application bundle named Gramps.app on your desktop.

Packaging

To make an uploadable disk image, create a folder named "Gramps-arch-version", replacing "arch" with either Intel or PPC and "version" with the current version number. Drag your app bundle to this directory. Open your build directory and copy (option-drag) the files "FAQ", "COPYING", "README", and "NEWS" to the Gramps folder you just made. Rename each to have a ".txt" extension so that they're readable with QuickLook. You might also rename COPYING to License.txt so that it's meaning is more clear to users who aren't familiar with the GPL.

Now open Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility and select File>New Image From Folder and select your folder, then approve the name and location. You'll have a dmg ready for distribution.